What is CouchDB? #3: Community & Ecosystem posted Wednesday, September 10, 2025 by The Neighbourhoodie Team CouchDBOffline FirstDistsysReplication

Since its first release the CouchDB ecosystem has become quite substantial — think adding everything from hammocks to a chaise. It’s not a marketing-driven technology, so if you needed more evidence of how widely CouchDB is used, you’re about to find a wealth of repos that have received contributions in the last weeks and months. Given CouchDB’s focus on long-term reliability, you’ll also find some older packages still humming along.

In part one of this series we kicked off with some history to understand CouchDB’s origins. We looked at the problems it addresses, and how those problems have evolved (or persisted, put another way) since. In part two we looked more closely at CouchDB’s core features and some exemplary use cases.

This third and final part aims to provide a community introduction and resource cache including some of CouchDB’s favourite utilities to help you get building. If you’ve been looking for tutorials and demos, read on! This is by no means complete, but it is comprehensive and designed to help you furnish your new, shiny CouchDB environment.

The CouchDB Community#

The CouchDB community is most active on Slack, where you can chat to more than 2,700 members from across time zones to ask for help, tips, and occasionally see what others are working on. There’s generally a new thread or question posted on a daily basis, and most of the time, people get help from other members during the course of the day they posted.

Another way to stay up-to-date with CouchDB is via its mailing lists. You can join the announcements list and user list to get going with release updates and community notifications.

Overlapping Communities#

Offline-First is something CouchDB supports in its sleep. We saw in the previous two parts of this series that CouchDB’s replication protocol means it’s well suited for offline-capable software applications. In the last couple of years there’s been growing interest in the topic, as more teams are choosing to ship reliable and user-friendly software that works in the real, intermittently disconnected world we live in.

Local-First is a newer community focused on a highly offline-first compatible vision: offline-capable software that prioritises user ownership. CouchDB’s commitment to data integrity and synchronisation make it an ideal fit for a local-first stack, and offers alternatives to CRDT conflict management. The community runs an annual conference, has a weekly newsletter and is most active on Discord.

The Neighbourhoodie team’s Jan Lehnardt recently presented How to Sync Anything at the monthly local-first meetup — check it out if you want to understand different approaches to syncing in either paradigm and get an idea of managing conflicts with and without CRDTs in CouchDB.

Newest Features#

At the time of writing, the current version is CouchDB 3.5.0, published in May 2025. If you’re using this or any version after 3.4.1, we recommend using these new features:

• Nouveau — for full-text search, fuzzy search and faceted querying.
  • 📺 Our team prepared a demo presentation if you want to see it in action.
• QuickJS — is CouchDB’s latest JavaScript engine. It is available in newer binaries of CouchDB (3.4.2 on).
  • 📺 We shared an intro and demo for that too when we celebrated its release.

Libraries & Utilities#

New libraries, wrappers and utilities are being built for CouchDB all the time for everything from Ruby to Python. It’s not surprising, given how exceptionally well it handles the use cases it’s best at, and what a reliable all-purpose database it is. Here is a short collection of our most recommended:

• PouchDB — has got to be at the top of this list. It’s CouchDB’s sibling project and is designed to run in the browser and facilitate offline capabilities. It’s a key ingredient in using CouchDB in local-first and offline-first projects, along with CouchDB’s unique replication protocol, of course. PouchDB is able to save your changes locally in the event your internet connection is unstable, and then syncs all your data with CouchDB again when it’s back online.
  • 📺 You guessed it: our team has a PouchDB demo for you to check out. We presented it at this year’s Local-First Conf.
  • 🎮 If you want to play around with something, a live PouchDB Stackblitz project using Vite and Svelte was recently shared by Jan Johannes in the CouchDB Slack.
• Nano — the official Apache CouchDB library for Node.js helps you write HTTP requests in JavaScript if you already know it well. It’s not too dissimilar from an SDK, and also comes with support for TypeScript out-of-the-box.
• CouchDB Minihosting — a tool authored by our team to help you set up a small, hosted CouchDB in no time. Be sure to take a look at our other public repos.
• NanoID — (not to be confused with the official Apache Nano project) provides a faster way to assign random _ids, which CouchDB needs to find your data. Read our recommendations for using it.

While those are our most-recommended bits and pieces, it’s just a fraction of the ecosystem. Below are some more things you will want to check out. As you do, you’ll also start to get familiar with the people in the ecosystem and recognise names and avatars across repositories and organisations:

• CouchDB Bootstrap from jo, Schmidt — bootstrap CouchDB server from CLI or API.
• py-couchdb from histrio, Rinat Sabitov — modern pure python CouchDB client.
• Crypto-Pouch from calvinmetcalf, Calvin Metcalf — plugin to encrypt a PouchDB database.
• pouchdb-paginators and more from garbados, DFB — be sure to browse her collection.
• LightCouch from IndabaConsultores — a Java client for a CouchDB database.
• CouchBackup from IBM — a command-line utility that backs up a CouchDB to a text file.
• coucharchive from adrienverge, Adrien Vergé — create and restore backups of a whole CouchDB server or cluster.
• Couchcopy from tolteck — create an archive of a running CouchDB node
• couchmigrate and more from glynnbird, Glynn Bird — be sure to browse their collection.
• SuperCouch from j3k0, Jean-Christophe Hoelt — Write CouchDB views to Redis with Sorted Sets.
• couch-photon and more from ermouth — an alternative CouchDB admin panel with all standard and a lot of unique features.
• PSCouchDB from MatteoGuardini, Matteo Guadrini aka GU — advanced CLI for CouchDB server
• couchapp-go from kangu — a command-line tool for parsing a folder structure and uploading its contents as a JSON document into a CouchDB database.
• Couchdb-sm and more from big-r81, Ronny Berndt — CouchDB repo for compiling and self-distributing Mozilla Spidermonkey. Be sure to see more in their collection.
• spiegel from Hedgeoff, Geoff Cox — scalable replication and change listening for CouchDB.
• Kivik from go-kivik — a common interface to CouchDB or CouchDB-like databases.
• quick-and-dirty-couch and more from teahouse-hosting — no-setup CouchDB Docker container, suitable for dev & testing; check out their repo collection.
• couch-to-postgres from sysadminmike — Node library to stream CouchDB changes into PostgreSQL with a simple client example.
• hammock-sync from hammock-sync — a CouchDB sync client for Android.
• build-couch-mac and more from janl, Jan Lehnardt — be sure to check out their collection.
• couchdb-cluster-config and more from gesellix, Tobias Gesellchen — be sure to look at the collection.
• pouchdb-live-find from colinskow, Colin Skow — Live PouchDB queries that update automatically as changes come in!

Tutorials#

• Basic Tutorial for PouchDB and CouchDB is a website where you can quickly get more familiar with key concepts that will help you start building.
• Learn how to use CouchDB as an API for PouchDB in this short article.
• For offline-first and local-first patterns with CouchDB, we have a couple of tutorials using CouchDB, PouchDB, Svelte, Vite and Pico.css to make apps that illustrate how to structure offline and local architecture, and demonstrates how to make the most of CouchDB and PouchDB’s attributes:
  • An Offline-First Todo List with Svelte, PouchDB and CouchDB
  • Offline-First with CouchDB and PouchDB in 2025
  • 📺 Getting started with PouchDB: basic, replication, offline data, conflicts and queries
• While real time-time is naturally a feature in the tutorial apps above, we have more detailed and more real-time focused tutorials and demos, including a delve into conflict-handling UIs with CouchDB, PouchDB and Svelte:
  • A real-time multi-user Kanban board with CouchDB and Svelte
    • Part 2: Automatic Conflict Resolution with CouchDB and Svelte
    • Part 3: Manual Conflict Resolution with CouchDB and Svelte
    • Part 4: Resource Locking with CouchDB and Svelte
  • 📺 Real-time with CouchDB: _changes feed and reactive backends
• We’ve also curated an offline architecture playlist, as well as CouchDB and PouchDB basics playlists with some great introductory material.

Hosting & Deployment#

As an open source database, CouchDB doesn’t come as a DBaaS. The closest thing is IBM’s Cloudant, which is based on CouchDB and whose team are key contributors to the project. Our short collection of tips:

• Minihosting — helps you get a Linux-hosted and Dockerised CouchDB instance up-and-running in minutes. It’s ideal for smaller projects.
• Google Cloud — can allocate you a CouchDB you can interact with via a connector.
• Deploying to Docker — is covered by CouchDB’s Docker binaries.
• For Kubernetes — CouchDB has made Helm charts available. You can find more testing assets on GitHub.
• FreeBSD — packages are provided.
• Snap — binaries are provided too.

More Resources#

While everything we’ve shared will get you more than going, you’ll need some sources of fresh news and updates. Look no further:

• CouchDB Blog — is the best place to stay up with CouchDB. It has a collection of user stories and has recently restarted a monthly digest to collect all the latest from the CouchDB world.
• CouchDB Documentation — is the best resource for learning concepts and finding usage information.
• CouchDB Slack — is the port of call for new, future and experienced CouchDB users and contributors alike.
• Neighbourhoodie — we have an active blog (with an RSS feed), as well as a YouTube channel. Join our newsletter to stay up-to-date with CouchDB, our work, and more resources.
• The Local-First Landscape can help you find compatible technology depending on your use case.

And there you have it! A (somewhat monster) starter-pack for your CouchDB discovery. We hope this article will find its way to your bookmarks as you start exploring. Let us know on Mastodon or Bluesky if you find more cool utilities we missed.

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